The IMA have announced a competition connected to the 54th British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) which took place last month at University College London. Four prizes of £100 are available for the best reports of between 500 and 1,500 words by attendees at the recent BAMC who are students or completed their PhDs within the past five years. You are encouraged to write about a talk you have seen or your experience of being at BAMC. Further details are given on the IMA website at: Win a £100 prize!
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Electoral reforms and non-transitive dice
Guest post by Andrew, of Manchester MathsJam. Andrew can be found on Twitter as @andrew_taylor and blogs occasionally about maths, among other things, at andrewt.net.
“Grime Dice” are a set of five coloured dice with unusual combinations of numbers on them. The red die, for example, has five fours and a nine. The blue one has three twos and three sevens, so it loses to the red die about 58% of the time. The green die has five fives and a zero, and will lose to the blue one in 58% of rolls. What makes them interesting is that the green die will beat the red one in 69% of rolls. These three dice behave rather like rock-paper-scissors — in mathematical terms, they are ‘non-transitive’. The full set of Grime Dice also has a purple and a yellow die, so a better analogy would be rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock.
Press release mayhem
On Google+ (sadly in a post with limited visibility, so I can’t link directly to it), Rongmin Lu (via David Roberts) highlights a case of “american whispers”, where a piece of research is helped along by press releases and media paraphrasing to become a completely different result.
Here’s how American whispers works:
1. You publish a paper, say on a new approximation to the discrete Fourier transform. To show the relevance of your work, you then say something like your new algorithm “improve[s] over the Fast Fourier Transform”.
2. Next, your institution’s press office issues a press release. To make it sound fun, they come up with a snazzy title “Faster-than-fast Fourier transform”. Pretty neat, huh?
3. Finally, some news website picks it up and then, suddenly, it’s all about “a new way of calculating Fast Fourier Transforms”. Ta-da!
I think you’d all agree that it’s way better than Chinese whispers.
Sergey Ten commented, saying that the press release in question wasn’t too bad, and mentions the idea that “random” data from real-world measurements is usually spread around a manifold of lower dimension than the sample space, which I think is the idea behind the paper Barcodes: the persistent topology of data, which I linked to in my last Interesting Esoterica summation.
On a similar note, Nalini Joshi points out that it isn’t news when centuries-old maths is used to solve a new problem: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-combining-centuries-old-mathematical-theorems-efficient.html
Update: Rongmin’s original post is hidden to the public, so I’ve pasted it in here. I hope the limited visibility was a side-effect of the way Google+ works and not a deliberate decision to restrict the post’s audience.
Laziest torus identified
Or, in similarly simplified headlinese, “Math finds the best doughnut”. A little bit more precisely, Fernando C. Marques and André Neves claim in a preprint on the arXiv to have proved the Willmore conjecture, that the minimum achievable mean curvature of a torus is $\frac{2}{\pi^2}$.
The article I linked to is some surprisingly non-stupid coverage from the Huffington Post. It seems they have a maths professor writing a column. I will never understand that site. I don’t know if there’s a Serious Business way of framing this, but the result is nice to know.
Richard Elwes has written a very short post on Google+ with some more real-maths information about what’s going on.
Maths Busking enters university outreach & public engagement competition
Maths Busking has been entered for ‘Engage U’, a “European Competition for Best Innovations in University Outreach and Public Engagement”. A detailed entry makes the case for Maths Busking, including the following description:
Maths Busking aims to show the public the surprising and fascinating side of mathematics through the medium of street performance.
The EngageU competition seeks:
to identify the most innovative outreach and public engagement activities that have been carried out by European Universities. We define outreach and public engagement in the broadest sense to incorporate all forms of interaction with individuals and organisations outside the university… The three winning entries will each receive a 5000 EUR prize for their institution… The three winners will be announced on 23 April 2012.
As well as being a competition, “all entries will be made public on the website, forming part of an online repository of good practice in outreach”.
You are encouraged to vote for entries and no registration is needed to do so.
A full list of entries, rules and further information is available via the EngageU website.
Minds of Modern Mathematics iPad App
Much is being made on Twitter of the IBM Minds of Modern Mathematics App. Okay if you have an iPad, I suppose. According to Wired, this:
presents an interactive timeline of the history of mathematics and its impact on society from 1000 to 1960… The app is based on an original, 50-foot-long “Men of Modern Mathematics” installation created in 1964 by Charles and Ray Eames. Minds of Modern Mathematics users can view a digitized version of the original infographic as well as browse through an interactive timeline with more than 500 biographies, math milestones and images of relevant artifacts.
Wikipedia explains that Men of Modern Mathematics was connected with the exhibit Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond, originally in the new science wing of the California Museum of Science and Industry. According to the Eames Office, “committed to communicating, preserving, and extending the legacy and work of Charles and Ray Eames” who designed the exhibit, Mathematica was “intended to enlighten the amateur without embarrassing the specialist”.
Wikipedia has this to say of the Men of Modern Mathematics poster:
In 1966, five years after the opening of the Mathematica Exhibit, IBM published a 2-by-12-foot (0.61 × 3.7 m) timeline poster—titled “Men of Modern Mathematics”—based on the items displayed on the exhibit’s History Wall, and distributed free copies to academics. The timeline covers the period from 1000 AD to approximately 1950 AD, and the poster has biographical and historical items along with numerous pictures showing progress in various areas of science, including architecture.
You can view still images of the poster at the Computer History Museum website.
iPad App: Minds of Modern Mathematics.
Wired: New IBM App Presents Nearly 1,000 Years of Math History.
Math/Maths 91: Gathering for Gardner 10
A new episode of the Math/Maths Podcast has been released.
A conversation about mathematics between the UK and USA from Pulse-Project.org. First Samuel and Peter were joined by special guest Edmund Harriss to talk about his time at Gathering for Gardner 10 and Five math things to do before you die, then they spoke with eachother about: Snowflake Growth Successfully Modeled from Physical Laws; A Joint Position Statement of the Mathematical Association of America and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics on Teaching Calculus; All the Math Taught at University Can Be Outsourced. What Now?; Mathematical Fonts; Intersections, Henry Moore and British modernism exhibition; Emmy Noether: The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of; Rechner Calculator; Math Awareness Month: Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge; and much more.
Get this episode: Math/Maths 91: Gathering for Gardner 10